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Dusk

by Marion Tracy

She’s started to avoid mirrors again.
They make other people’s faces seem
bigger than they should be

and sometimes much nearer.
Perhaps ‘mirror’ is really another word
for the idea of night

as if the glass, like a leaf, might curl
and drop, leaving only a frame
where the day was.

There would be a fold inside her then,
a trace of water in the air, flying insects.
But, in truth, the many absences

of night need never be complete,
in a forest or in a story,
if a bargain with the dark can be struck.

About this poem

First published in 2015.

Joint runner-up in the 2015 Stanza Poetry Competition on the theme of Darkness, judged by Jo Bell.

Jo Bell: A direct, engaging first line which compelled me to read on. This feels like a poem that has been edited down to its core. Its language is simple: it relies on a big idea to give it a firm skeleton, rather than building itself a shiny carapace of adverbs and abstracts. There were many poems about mirrors, but this one went deeper, addressing the ‘bargain with the dark’ which all of us try to strike.

Marion: I often write about psychological states and also about the liminal and Dusk just came together from ideas, phrases and images. The poem is expressing that moment of anxiety which may come as daylight fades.

Marion Tracy lives in Brighton. She has an MA in English Literature and taught in Further Education Colleges. She has been writing her own poetry now for eight years and had a pamphlet Giant in the Doorway out with Happenstance in 2012.